The enigmatic personnage known as
MCLSSAA2@... contributes:
>I thought that Semitic and IE were both descended from Nostratic, so a
>Semitic word that looks like an IE word might not be a borrowing either way
>but a native cognate;
Yes, Semitic and IE are thought by many (including me) to be descended from
Nostratic, a language generally dated to about 15,000 BCE. Semitic is an
Afro-Asiatic language, closely related to the other AA branches: Omotic,
Chadic, Cushitic, Berber and Egyptian.
However, even so, probabilities must be carefully given priority here. That
is, the chance of any given word being inherited in two language groups
seperated by some 15,000 years is FAR smaller than the chance that the
shared words were borrowed sometime within those long 15,000 years of
development. If we jump the gun claiming that just about any similarities
are due to inheritance (something that many long-range linguists are very
guilty of), we risk never coming to the actual truth.
To give an example of what I mean, I could easily illustrate the sticky
relationship between English and French. There are many words shared between
English and French that obscure the actual relationships of the two
languages... Words like "season/saison", "render/rendre", "royal/royale",
"deuce/deux", etc. We all know that all these words are not inherited from
IE but rather are the product of borrowing but if we didn't we might have
trouble recognizing that English is a Germanic language while French is
Italic. Sometimes English borrows from Latin as well... sometimes French
does too. Sometimes German from French, German from English, or English from
German, yadayadayada. It gets really ugly at times so we have to keep our
head on our shoulders and treat each comparandum as a special case.
MCLSSAA2@...:
>I can imagine the Nostratic speakers living in the Middle East and
>their descendants who became the PIE speakers migrating north over
>the Caucasus to the classical PIE homeland as the Russian steppes
>became more habitable as the last Ice Age receded.
It's somewhat certain that a proto-Nostratic would have been spoken
somewhere in the Middle East environs however I agree with Allan Bomhard's
view that the ancestor of the PIE language called "Eurasiatic" first slowly
migrated to Central Asia and then westward through the steppes to the Black
Sea to account for the close relationship IE appears to have with the Altaic
and Uralic-Gilyak language groups which would have had to have made the same
migration.
>>Bomhard's Nostratic reconstruction *?as'- (#434) is far too weak >>...
>
>Excuse my ignorance, but what is the Bomhard's work that this
>apparently numbered list of Nostratic roots is in?
Oh, sorry. "Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis", published in 1996 a
la Signum.
>What evidence is there that Semitic speakers expanded as far as the
>Balkans? I know that there are some Semitic-looking placenames in
>Greece (e,g. Salamis), but they could have been brought over by
>Phoenician etc sailors trading with Europe and naming trading depots
>there in their own language.
Well, here's where things get a little medieval on my hiney. I continue to
find it annoying that IEists only vaguely mention the probability of
Semitic-IE relations without fully going into detail as to how this may have
occured. IE is generally dated to about 4000 BCE. Semitic is even older than
this. We have words like *sweks "six" and *septm "seven" that are quite
obviously Semitic in origin. In the case of *septm, the word is totally
indivisable in IE (the *-m accusative was never used as a derivational
suffix in IE!). Its Semitic counterpart however *seb`itum appears to be made
up of *seb`- "seven", the -t- suffix signifying masculine in this case and
the common Semitic termination *-m. There are some other very suspicious
roots like *teuros "bull" (*Tawru-) as well.
Given that, many IEists accept ancient Semitic contact but they don't know
when, where or how nor do they try. So, _I_ try instead. Now, placing
proto-IE in Anatolia has been tried and fails to gain much support... so I'm
not interested in that idea at all (and afterall, Bomhard's Asiatic solution
to IE origins is the sanest I've seen yet). Conversely, placing
proto-Semitic in the Balkans also does not work because surely, based on the
spread of the daughter languages, Semitic must have been located somewhere
around Syria or Palestine, not the Balkans.
Therefore, the only satisfying solution I can possibly think up is the
following: There is an unattested sister language to Semitic, which I call
"Semitish", spoken further north in Western Anatolia and the Balkans
c.6500-6000 BCE. Its speakers would have been the first agriculturalists
into Europe, which would explain why a large chunk of identifiable Semitic
words in IE are agricultural in nature. The Semitish speaking peoples would
have spread marginally into Europe, interacting with IE and Tyrrhenian to
the north. (Tyrrhenian is the mother language of Etruscan, Lemnian and
Rhaetic.) By 5500 BCE or so, Tyrrhenian would have started to spread and to
supplant Semitish in the Balkans. Then by 5000 BCE, Semitish had completely
died out in the Balkans and West Anatolia due to the new preference for
Tyrrhenian in these areas...
... or perhaps not quite. One then wonders about an obscure "Kaskian"
language that we find in north central Anatolia. The "Kashku" are mentioned
in Hittite historical records. Apparently they were "linen-weavers" and
"pig-raisers". But alas, I have trouble finding anything more about our
wonderful Kashku friends so the mystery continues. Are they the remains of
Semitish? Hmm...
- gLeN
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